How to Build Humans from Sorrow
by DeathsLights
Summary: They don't talk about how sometimes Stiles wakes up with a scream in his throat, or how Derek places a hand over his heart and rubs, smooths the scream away. They don't talk about how Derek likes to put his nose between the curve of Stiles's neck, his hand under Stiles' shirt as his thumb sweeps against the soft belly.


How to Build Humans from Sorrow

The hallway is dark. The walls are graffiti covered. There are puddles of water. His feet are bare, and he doesn't want to be here. His ears are plugged, heavy headed with the sharp static in his ear, he walks and has no choice. The hallway opens up to a bigger space where crumbling pillars covered in moss stand and fragments from a ceiling that doesn't exist litter the floor. He looks up and there is no more sky, only the full moon too large for the sky to contain it. The moon isn't white it is a fading yellow like the soft glow of an old lightbulb. He has to look down, the panic wells, and he wants to scream, but the sound gets stuck in his sternum. Blood seeps onto the floor, he can't move, he can't move‒

Stiles wakes to his ceiling, heart too loud, and skin too hot. He digs his nails into the mattress, holds his breath, lets the pressure build up in his chest until it chokes him. He only breathes when he hears an echoing howl in the solitary night. There's something wrong with the sound, the way it weeps through the stillness thick with sorrow. Thick with heartbreak.

The lacrosse ball grows distant, falls back, grows distant, and falls back as he tosses it up in the air. He isn't sure if Scott's sudden need to actually try for once is a side effect of the alpha upgrade or some sort of late care for his academic career. Stiles had spent the first three years of high school trying to get Scott to give a shit. Years of library times that Scott decided to forget about, countless Stiles made review sheets (dumbed down, but don't tell Scott) that Scott lost, so many sheets of paper lost and never read, which is why he spends all the time in their study session fucking around. Stiles is a petty bitch he knows. Scott's face has progressed from mild confusion to oh my god is science allowed to do that? Yes, Scott science is allowed to show what a dissected pig fetus looks like, you work for a vet this isn't a surprise.

"What do you think Derek does in the forest?" he asks, scooting to catch his misjudged throw.

Scott stares at the gloss paper of his biology book with such devotion that Stiles is sure he's going to be blessed by Darwin himself.

"I don't know, Stiles just leave him alone."

"But like do you think he spends his time running free with all the woodland creatures?" He hopes that's what Derek is doing because the other alternative makes his throat too thick. He'd gone to the old Hale house once. There had been nothing there. There hadn't been for along time but letting go of regret is not something that comes to Derek. He'd seen Peter, staring out in the distance, eyes human lost and grieving for a moment.

Scott sighs and closes his book. He tosses it on his desk and comes to lie next to him. "Let Derek do what he does in the forest."

"Do you know what he does there?"

Scott wiggles his shoulders, getting comfortable on the bed. He crosses his fingers over his stomach and watches the ball come up and down. "He does what he does to feel better, and sometimes it's easier to be a beast, Stiles." Scott sighs. "Derek isn't like us. Even though I'm part of what he is I'm also human. I'm not like him either. The only one who was was Peter a long time ago." Scott scratches his eyebrow. "When you're a wolf, feelings and emotions are simpler, you feel what you feel. When you're a human everything is harder, feelings and emotions get muddled in a way, complicated and tangled. Life for Derek happened too fast and it never stopped. I don't think Derek ever learned how to deal with that. I understand why he stays in the forest enough to let him be, but I can never understand everything because I wasn't born like he was."

Scott doesn't say anything for awhile just stares at the ceiling.

"Do you ever want to be a beast?" He feels Scott's shoulder against his, warm and whole.

"Yeah. But I can't run away." There is no escape, sins cannot be washed, guilt cannot be shed, and regrets can't be abolished. All they can do is survive.

He turns his chair and freezes.

Derek raises his eyebrow as if _he's_ the one that's surprised the fucking creeper. Derek's got Macbeth open in his lap and he's got a few pages left. Stiles inhales and holds his breath, releasing it slowly. "How long have you been there?"

"Since one a.m. I was waiting for you to finish."

He gets this is Derek's attempt at trying to be polite but there are times, very rare and small, that he misses barely socially functioning Derek, the one who demanded rather than asked.

"And?"

Derek closes the book and puts it back on the shelf. "Would you mind letting me stay here for a few nights?"

"Why can't you just‒" right, houses never work out for Derek. "Why not ask Scott?"

"I can't."

"Why?" Stiles questions.

Derek's set his mouth into a line and he's got his shoulders straight.

"I can't," Derek repeats.

Stiles frowns. "You and Scott are still moon buddies, right?"

Derek scowls. "Scott and I are fine."

"But you won't ask him." Derek remains stubborn and silent. He sighs and nods. "Okay."

"Thanks," Derek says to the floor.

Stiles waves it off and tries not to let the strangeness of it get to him. "Yeah, whatever, Big Bad." A few nights won't matter. Derek will be gone before he notices anything. Everyone in Beacon Hills is a little broken now their souls raked with loss and tragedy.

The forest in Beacon Hills embraces everything, it's always on the edge spanning across the entire circumference of their town. Stiles can't help but watch the shadows near the outskirts of the woods, the smallest movement in the under bush or the slight bend of a branch.

"Stiles."

He shakes his head and turns to look at Dr. Solei. He's got one of those Victorian style chairs it's upholstered red with a three-tiered wooden crown on top, the wooden frame has curving vines on it. The Doctor smiles and he's got perfect teeth, all spaced out even, his bottom teeth are copies of the other straight like a white picket fence. "You're far away, aren't you?"

Stiles looks away from the mesmerising teeth and rubs his eye.

"A little tired," he says.

Dr. Solei makes a note on his paper.

"How have you been sleeping lately?"

Stiles brings his finger to his mouth and grabs a lose piece of skin on the edge peeling it off. "Not well, it's the same as always."

The Doctor nods and makes another note. Stiles looks back at the woods behind the doctor's chair. The wind blows and everything sways, the branches teeter.

"You're not going to recommend sleeping pills are you". What else do the woods hide?

Dr. Solei sighs and finishes his writing before putting his pen down.

"The problem is everyone ends up building a tolerance to sleeping pills eventually, so they won't be effective for very long. I want them to be a last resort, I'm sorry Stiles I know this isn't the answer you want."

Doctor Solei frowns and he is sorry, but Stiles can't sleep anymore.

The first time Derek sees him have a nightmare is a week into him crashing there. He wakes to Derek over him. He doesn't know he's talking until Derek leans his head against his and closes his eyes. "Shhh, Stiles. Shhh." He buries his head into Derek's forearm and lets Derek curl around him as the nightmare congeals over his chest and chokes him. Derek says nothing and he's relieved.

It is not just Stiles that can't sleep it is Derek too. Derek will turn on his side and pretend to sleep, but his shoulders don't lose the tightness and in the mornings sorrow tugs at his lip and his eyes are a hollowed out. He starts to talk at night half to relieve the nervous thrum of electricity and to fill the silence sort of like white noise. He does it for a few nights talks about school, random bits of knowledge lodged up his brain that isn't really useful but is there. He keeps talking even when his tongue feels laden in his mouth and doesn't fit right.

"So, if a werewolf bites a vampire does it become a werepire? What if a vampire bites a werewolf does it become a vamwolf? Which one would be more dangerous?" He bets the werepire has bat wings.

Derek sighs and turns around. The moon is bright enough that Stiles can see his face and even though it's been years Derek still makes something pull in the bottom of his stomach.

"Stiles you can't combine two strains of monster bites, it isn't a virus you can mutate as you please. You are one or the other."

"But what about Jackson?"

"Jackson was a mistake. He wasn't stable enough for the bite so something else took hold."

Stiles snorts. "Everything about Jackson was a mistake. Okay, what if a werewolf and a vampire love each very much and they‒"

Derek glares and scrunches his nose. "Werewolves and vampires don't fuck because it's disgusting."

Stiles leans closer. "What no taboo star-crossed lovers in the world of monsters?"

"Werewolves and vampires don't fuck, Stiles. A vampire is always the undead and what they give up in order to become what they are doesn't leave anything but a monster behind. They smell of decay and rot."

He thinks for a minute. "So, it would be necrophilia?"

Derek nods. He looks out the window and Stiles stares at the curve of his cheekbone, maybe he's just tired or he does it because he can. He reaches out and places his palm on Derek's cheek and Derek doesn't do anything.

"You can't love something that isn't all there," Derek says to the moon after a minute.

"No one is ever fully there, Derek. We learn to love what is left after everything." He sweeps his finger down the curve, falling in love with Derek was never hard. The problem is reminding himself that a one-sided love is just that.

The one thing that Stiles forgets about Derek is that he is a stubborn fucker. Derek Hale has decided that Stiles's bed, the one he's had since he's been seven, is his. Now his bed has Derek Hale's bloodstains to prove it and Stiles has been finding black dog hairs on his pillow.

Derek will sneak in without a knock on his window and lie down on his bed. Each and every time Stiles will not know until he turns his computer chair and because Derek's a dick he won't knock or shower to get rid of his forest stench.

He'll lie down on his side the blades of his shoulder's visible underneath his shirt, his leather jacket hung around his chair, with his face to the door. Sometimes there will be dried blood along his collarbone or a tear on his shirt.

Stiles scratches his nose and edits a paragraph, the keys giving way to his fingers. He bites his tongue and knocks his knee against his desk. Don't say it, don't say it, don't sa‒

"You know you can shower right, you've already seized my bed go extend that to the bathroom."

Derek's back straightens.

There are very few things Stiles wants to take back in his life. He once told Lydia her new foundation was one and a half shades off. He did not take that back, but right now he wants to pick the words from the air and stomp them into the ground.

He just needs to keep quiet for a few seconds and it'll be good, maybe play dead?

"You're covered in mud and blood, dude wash it off you're starting to smell."

 _Damn it._

Stiles stares at his window if he jumps out the worst will be a broken ankle maybe a rib but at least all of his organs will stay internal. He starts to roll his chair closer to the window.

Derek snorts.

Stiles stops his escape plan and narrows his eyes.

"What?"

Derek rolls over to look at him. "Your bathroom smells like a middle schooler realizing that they smell and the only possible solution is axe."

Oh, that fucker.

"And you smell of what? Magic and pixie dust?"

Derek shifts his teeth into fangs and smiles.

"I smell of the forest and sweat—natural things, the way people are supposed to."

Stiles wants to wack Derek with his computer chair and maybe his desk. "Your natural must isn't attractive it's gross and everywhere in my room."

Derek smiles wider and Stiles is sure that's what Venus flytraps would look like on the human mouth. "Not my problem, is it?"

 _Motherfucker_.

He's staring at the ceiling above Scott's bed a strawberry twizzler in his mouth slithering up his cheek with each bite. Scott has his notes spread out in front of him. He can hear the crinkling and rustling of papers as Scott tries to learn enough to pass his mid-term, which if he had actually come to class might be going well instead of being a creature in forest with Derek.

"Scott, do you remember when you were a baby wolf and went around peeing and biting things?"

Scott looks over his shoulder and frowns. "Did you just say peeing?"

Stiles takes the twizzler out of his mouth and waves it in the air. "You know the howling on rooftops new wolf high-"

Scott's trying to glare but on him it looks more like he's trying to read small print. "I didn't go _peeing_ on things Stiles."

"Yeah, yeah, whatever so in your baby wolf days," Scot's eyebrows burrow down. Stiles wacks him with his candy rope. "You had this problem with smells, right? What was the deal with that?"

Scott scratches his head. "Do you remember that year the garbage men went on strike in the summer? We couldn't step outside of our houses the smell was so strong that we'd throw up? That's what the world was like, everything was wrong it was like being blinded by smells."

"What made it okay?"

Scott writes down Oxygen in his notes a dot of ink is left behind on edge of his fingers. "Nothing makes it go away you learn to control and that's it."

Stiles chews his lip, rolls onto his back, and Scott goes back to studying. He waits a few minutes before speaking.

"By the way the compound of life isn't Oxygen Scott; it's Carbon."

He smiles around his twizzler at the cry Scott gives.

The radio plays on an annoyingly loud level where he can't tune out the music, but at the same time he hear the rolling of metal of shopping carts. Stiles taps a beat against his thigh. His shopping cart behind him filled with two different kinds of bodywash, soap, deodorant, and hair care products. He's spent twenty minutes just in the household section and he's now sitting crossed on the tiles trying to decide which one to buy. The problem is once you notice how large a selection is of something there is no way you can ever go back to just buying that one brand you always did, it's like staring into pandora's box, there are so many brands of detergent. Hundreds and hundreds of boxes and bottles is there a difference between powder and liquid? Stiles glances around before unscrewing the top of one and sniffs it, it smells nice not flowers but something darker and earthier. He asked once what Derek's favourite scent was. "The deep preserve where my siblings and I used to play." Stiles gets up and puts it into the cart.

Stiles stares up at his ceiling, huh, you can still see the glue residue from when he put up the glow in the dark stars when he was four. He had wanted the constellations to be accurate and his mom and dad had spent weeks looking up references and placing the stars in the correct places, measuring and remeasuring the distances between stars. His dad looking at the star maps confused not understanding how they looked anything like their names, his mom sticking the stars up. Eventually, they dropped from his ceiling like fallen stars after.

Derek's head comes into view. He places a hand over Stiles's chest to stop him from headbutting their heads together. "Why does your room smell like this?"

Stiles holds his breath in his chest and lets it out, digging his nails into Derek's wrist. "Don't ever do that."

"Why does your room smell like this," he repeats.

He tries to get Derek to move his hand, but he won't. "Because people wash their stuff and although you like to live in the woods like a hermit that doesn't mean you don't know how normal people live."

Derek's nostrils flare and he frowns.

"Also take a shower, you aren't getting into my bed smelling like you do." Stiles digs his nails deeper into Derek's wrist. "I'm not washing my sheets again."

He hates staring into Derek's kaleidoscope eyes where there are too many colours to focus on. Derek lets go and heads to the shower. Stiles stares at the ceiling, do falling stars erode in the atmosphere or do they fall in star bursts onto the ground and become forgotten among the rocks?

He's drowsy when Derek gets back. The bed dips. He can feel the warmness from Derek's back; it makes him sleepier. Derek smells of a forest after a rainstorm, like the deep part of the Preserve when everything is silent, everything hunkers down and the creatures hide. It's a little cold, the kind that makes you sleepy, the water drips down from the leaves into the puddles, the sky is grey, and you aren't sure if the rain will come again or not. Stiles presses his back against Derek's. He sleeps.

They don't talk about how sometimes Stiles wakes up with a scream in his throat, or how Derek places a hand over his heart and rubs and smooths the scream away. They don't talk about how Derek likes to put his nose between the curve of Stiles's neck, his hand under Stiles' shirt, thumb sweeping against the soft belly.

Scott comes over one day to hangout. He pauses on the boundary of his door eyes lingering on his unmade bed. Scott's nose twitches. "Derek's living here."

Stiles flips through some papers on his desk. "Huh, yeah he just needs a place to crash."

"Were you going to tell me?"

Where is the review sheet? He had it last night.

"Stiles."

"What?"

Scott stares at him and he knows something. He opens his mouth before closing it. "Did you find the review sheet?"

When Derek comes back Stiles watches him for a long time. Derek hangs up his jacket, takes a towel, places his hand on the back of Stiles's neck, and squeezes before going to the bathroom. The pipes rattle. The rain shower starts. The water pitters against the tile. Stiles lies on his bed rubs his nose against his pillow and smells Derek. _Oh._ Derek comes back body shower warn. He waits until Derek is in his bed to talk.

"Scott was here." Derek tenses.

He turns on his side, so they are facing each other. Stiles lifts his fingers to trace the concave under Derek's eye. "You aren't just crashing here."

"No," he agrees the word slow. Stiles smiles, tired but real.

Scott warns him once. They are sitting on the picnic benches outside school. Scott on the desk and him on the bench head resting on his out stretched arm. Scott's skin is pink in the sun as he watches the stray freshman trudge home. Maybe it is the way that Stiles' gaze lingers on Derek, or the way Derek stares back that makes Scott say something.

"Wolves don't love the same way humans do, Stiles."

He spreads his palm on the wood and feels splinters shatter into his skin.

"I don't think a human could love me anymore."

Scott grips his wrist and says nothing.

He can hear the starting chirps of the house sparrows; the darkness is receding and the sun is turning the sky purple. Stiles turns the tap and fills up a glass, he turns, leans against the kitchen counter watching the clock. The coffee maker gurgles, dripping into the decanter.

His dad comes in his uniform.

"Morning, kid."

Stiles rises his glass in greeting.

The sheriff pours the coffee into his mug. He adjusts his glasses opens a casefile.

"How are you sleeping?"

The words take a few seconds to connect in his head. Stiles looks down at his glass instead of answering.

"Better."

The sheriff nods. "Does that have to do with the change in detergent?"

"Maybe? I don't think there is lavender in anything I changed out."

His dad flips the report as Stiles starts to wash out his mug.

"Or?"

"Or?" Stiles repeats.

"Does it have to do with a certain Hale in your bed?"

He drops the glass and peeks over his shoulder. His dad rubs his chin, keeping his eyes on the paper.

"Um, Derek just needed a place for a bit. I didn't mean to keep it from you. Things are weird?"

The sheriff's eyebrow raises. "The problem isn't Derek is staying here the problem is that Derek is staying here like a fugitive. He can come down for breakfast sometimes. Kid could use something normal." Wait, what? "So, are you and Derek a thing?"

What?

"I don't know, maybe?"

His dad peers over his glasses. "Maybe's don't end up in bed together."

Stiles watches the stillness of the water in his cup. Sometimes, there is a safety in the ambiguity of things—in a way that time stalls there.

He leans his head against Derek's and whispers, "when you're in the forest what are you looking for?"

They are facing each other. Stiles knows the skin underneath is eyes is starting to blue and purple. Derek's got a sad tilt to his mouth. They are broken people unable to sleep at night. Derek reaches out, sweeping his thumb over the bruising skin. He can feel the heat from Derek underneath the blanket. Stiles licks his dry lips, feels the cervices in his lips, the rough peeling skin, and tastes the metallic tang. Derek smooths his thumb over his bottom lip. Wolves do not howl alone. Derek slides his hand down to his neck. He says nothing for a long time.

Eventually as Stiles drifts, Derek answers or maybe he doesn't. "For someone to answer back."

He looks at his dad and says, "I know. Just give us time to figure it out." Give us time in the town of broken things, to figure out what pieces are left, and how to feel something again. Give us time to learn how to be human once more.


End file.
